Recently by Ben Hurst

So you're sitting in an advertising meeting. You're a highly paid executive who has been employed because you always come up with the right idea.

You've got a new product to sell. Yes it's a snazzy mobile phone holder which sticks to the windscreen of the car.

What do you do - yes! I've got it - a woman pointing to her husband as he cleans the window (or maybe it's an Albanian asylum seeker who has swooped at the traffic lights with a squeegie bottle and sponge.) Customer: "I'll take ten please!".

Next after the success of your previous campaign you've got a huge budget to spunk - what do you do? That's right hire a 'hip' celebrity. I know - a rapper - Usher!

What next? Ah, just get him to hold the bloody thing and make 'gangsta' hand signs. No wait! Let's go for broke and get him holding TWO phones! That'll slay 'em:

Laptops are cool - people use them for social networking. Our ones are so cool young people would stand NEXT to each other socially networking on them instead of talking. Cool.

Finally what sells? Sex sells that's what! Get a lovely in her pants, stick a phone in her hand. Tell her: "Look Sexy." Wait for the orders to flood in. If not, a job on the Daily Star awaits.

I blogged recently about the new offering from nvidia, the £450 280gtx and how I was completely underwhelmed by the latest releases of computer components.

Perhaps I was feeling fatigued by the constant stream of slightly tweaked and overclocked graphics cards masquerading as the 'next big thing', but I couldn't get excited, even though the 280 is, in fact, very quick.

But now the situation has changed somewhat - and I actually feel myself becoming excited again by new releases.

The reason is that nvidia's competitor ATI has finally got its act together and released competitive cards at the right prices.

As the graph of frames per second at high resolution in current game Crysis shows, the £125 4850 card is the real jack in the box - just about as good as the 9800gtx which is more than £75 extra.

And the top of the range £200 4870 is in some tests better than the £250 nvidia 260 card. This leaves the 280 at the top of the pile - but let's face it, at a minimum of £400 who bar the most deranged tek head with no girlfriend, or, let's face it, life, will be able to afford it?

I almost feel myself catching the upgrade bug - the benefits of competition at long last!

The technological innovation of the wind turbine is currently in the news after the government unveiled proposals to radically expand the current number around the country.

Fair enough - wind is a tremendous resource if it can be harnessed properly.

I personally hate the turbines because they tend to be built in the most beautiful rural areas - completely ruining some of the most unspoilt parts of the country.

Because they're considered 'green' it seems like the normal planning laws don't apply.

But I was contacted by Dr David Hill, claiming to be from the World Innovation Foundation Charity from Bern, Switzerland.

He said that the £100 billion scheme will be something of a white elephant, explaining that in 2003, for example, the world's wind farms were only producing electricity for 24.1 per cent of the year.

Dr Hill said: "The facts are that these turbines only reach maximum efficiency when the wind speed is between 10 and 20mph and where below 8mph these turbines just simply do not produce any electricity at all.

"Added to these facts is that above 20mph efficiencies go down and when over 56mph they all stop producing electricity completely due to cut out and risk of damage. Indeed, a significant number of wind turbines in fact cut out at 33mph."

He explained that the turbines last around nine years - meaning that we'll have to bung in £100 billion then as well.

So they won't work most of the time, when the winds are highest and therefore most productive they'll cut out , they'll need replacing soon and our green and pleasant land will be ruined.

Nice environmental plan guys!

Who needs the most cutting edge graphics when sometimes simplicity is what's best?

Prepare yourself for a seriously addictive game - we give you tower defence!

Edit - I suppose I should put some instructions up too!

The aim of the game is to kill the creeps before they reach the end of the maze, do this by building attacking towers on the grass around the maze.

At the start of the game the only towers you can build are the basic towers.

To build "Elemental Towers" you must first research the 3 elements. Research costs wood. You are given 1 wood every 7 levels. Once researched you can build as many "Elemental Towers" of the type you have researched as you can afford. The combo tower is only available if you have researched all 3 elements.

Special levels include FAST [6, 13, 19, 26, 32] AIR [8, 17, 27] IMMUNE [10, 21, 32] and BOSS [11, 22, 33] You get wood every 7 levels use wood to research upgrades.

One last thing - the game was written by top man David Scott - to find out more about his stuff click here!

I see the latest 'big thing' in the graphics card world has come out - the £450 GTX280.

Is it just me or do new hardware releases - fail to excite completely, be they cpus or gfx?

I remember when the 6800gt came out and everyone got extremely excited and went out and bought one even at £250+.

I think it's not so much the performance increases being less impressive, rather general 'update fatigue'.

The manufacturers have induced indifference through launching a new product line (esp gfx cards) every three months or so.

This has royally narked some who just bought the latest tech, which has recently come out, only to be repeatedly told they should have hung on another week for something 20 per cent faster at the same price.

Both the 2900 series and 8800 series are serial offenders at this.

Now I just think the days of automatically upgrading to the next generation have waned somewhat. People just think they'll skip a family of cards and wait for the next one.

The latest way to spend £450 - the 2800gtx.

I got a press release through the other day from IGA Worldwide "the leading independent in-game advertising network".

They've just signed a deal with EA, or Electronic Arts, to provide all their plugging for the Playstation 3.

According to the bumph the contract means the 13 million PS3 owners will now be bombarded with in-game advertising.

The release says: "Sony recently opened its PS3(TM) platform to allow brands to advertise dynamically within games played on the popular video game console."

Well that was nice of Sony wasn't it? (I particularly like the TM thrown in like a breeze block emphasizing the product).

I enjoyed the explanation of why gamers would actually benefit from the experience: "The advertisements are integrated within the gaming environment in order to deliver a seamless and more authentic game environment."

Well, I suppose they're right - being bombarded with product placement is certainly part of normal everyday life.

I remember when the only ads in games were spoof ones - often in something like Duke Nukem there'd be pics of naked women advertising something - god knows what - it wasn't big, it wasn't clever, but at least it was (slightly) funny (if you were an adolescent male that is).

Will this 'advance' keep prices down for PS3 gamers (normal release price £49.99) - errr, no.

And EA, for god's sake. They are hardly famous for insisting on finished products being released.

Who can forget Battlefield 2 on PC - still getting massive bug fix patches YEARS after its release.

Elizabeth Harz, EA's Senior Vice President said: "EA is committed to providing both great entertainment experiences for consumers and effective advertising solutions for marketers."

It's come to something when a games publisher says it's 'committed' to a concept like 'creating effective advertising solutions'.

I await the first in-game ad break.

Adverts - coming to a game near you!

Lack of competition is never a good thing.

For us consumers it normally means higher prices and less choice, so the news that Intel's new Nehalem processors, due for release this winter is looking like a cracker is a mixed blessing.

Back in the day the AMD 64 series of single cored processors absolutely killed everything Intel had on the market, and so everyone bought one.

The launch of the Conroe dual cored type from Intel completely turned the situation on its head - Intel was now the daddy - and AMD's fortunes have somewhat waned.

With early reviews suggesting the Nehalem is 20 - 50 per cent quicker than anything around at the moment shows Intels dominance is assured.

This is quite a leap forward in computer processor terms, and AMD will be struggling to reply.

The ball's in your court AMD - and for all our sakes I hope you can come up with a winner.

For your titillation here's a pic of the new Nehalem on the left, compared to the current Penryn on the right - enjoy computer fans!!!

Just a quick update on the eBay feedback issue - apparently there's quite a stink being kicked up at the Internet Retailer 2008 Conference & Exhibition taking place at the moment in Chicago.

It seems that sellers are fuming that non-paying bidders are simply leaving them negative feedback and ebay isn't removing it.

According to the gossip, if a seller starts an unpaid item dispute, when the buyer gets the note through, all they have to do is respond.

eBay, whose customer service and complaints department is mostly automated emails, can't cope if someone sends back a message as part of this disputes process.

So if a buyer sends back the message to the unpaid item note: "I'm not paying, sod off" eBay notes it as a reply and refuses to remove negative feedback, even though the item has not been paid for.

I predict change, and soon.

"Cool - time to kick some ass!"

"Gonna tear him a new one!"

"Shake it baby!"

If those words mean nothing to you then you're probably not going to be massively excited that footage of that long awaited shooter Duke Nukem Forever has been finally seen.

The ultra violent cartoonish game has been in development for more than 12 YEARS!!!!

The last title was Duke Nukem 3D - and the fact that 3D was in the title shows how long ago that was - previously most games were 2D.

It was funny, violent, and the first massive level was released on shareware - and one of the first games ever to do so.

It was hugely successful and if you paid for the extra two levels you weren't disappointed - they were fantastic - especially the one set in space.

So will it finally arrive? I'm not holding my breath although Amazon is allowing pre-orders for November 30 this year.

Mind you it's also offering Chinese Democracy by Guns N' Roses for August 25, and we know how likely that one is to come out!

Perhaps I'll go for broke and pre order both - come on Duke N' Axl - you know you want to!

I see online auction site eBay has come a cropper in France for allowing the sale of fake goods.

Readers will know that I have a slight bee in my bonnet over this well known internet giant, and in the past have railed at their indifference to all fraud and other illegal activities taking place there.

A simple search of well known fashion names shows hundreds upon hundreds of items - all allegedly 'bought new with tags'.

Of course only a very small proportion is real - an absolute scandal which eBay has been unwilling to tackle - after all every sale means money in the bank to them.

The sheer scale of the counterfeit goods operation on eBay means that they would see a massive hit in their profits, so they pay lip service to combating it, but in my opinion, in reality do little.

Now they've been fined, will anything change? Well, eBay's line has always been 'it's not our problem' saying they are simply a conduit for a sale and can't be held responsible.

Try reporting something dodgy and see where that gets you - a lot of automatically generated customer service emails - that's where!

So will anything change? Probably not, but it'll be interesting watching to see what happens. I'm also monitoring the situation with regards to the decision to ban negative seller feedback while raising their cut from auctions (not to mention insisting on people signing up to Paypal - in the interests of security you understand, not so eBay gets a cut from the auction selling price, and then from the payment too, oh no, perish the thought!).

We can only hope the profiteering, poor customer service and arrogance of eBay comes back to haunt it!

Feel free to follow me at BenHurst on Twitter and I'll try and tweet when I do a new blog.